Mortality burden and socioeconomic status in India

Background

The dimensions along which mortality is patterned in India remains unclear. We examined the specific contribution of social castes, household income, assets, and monthly per capita consumption to mortality differentials in India.

Methods and Findings

Cross-sectional data on 217 363 individuals from 41 554 households from the 2004–2005 India Human Development Survey was analyzed using multiple logistic regressions. Mortality differentials across social castes were attenuated after adjusting for household economic factors such as income and assets. Individuals living in the lowest income and assets quintiles had an increased risk of mortality with odds ratio (OR) of 1.66 (95% CI  = 1.23–2.24) in the bottom income quintile and OR of 2.94 (95% CI  = 1.66–5.22) in the bottom asset quintile. Counter-intuitively, individuals living in households with lowest monthly consumption per capita had significantly lower probability of death (OR  = 0.27, 95% CI  = 0.20–0.38).

Conclusions

Mortality burden in India is largely patterned on economic dimensions as opposed to caste dimensions, though caste may play an important role in predicting economic opportunities.     

Paleosol caliche in the New Haven Arkose,Newark Group,Connecticut

The New Haven Arkose is a 1500–2500 m sequence of fluvial red beds of Late Triassic and probably Early Jurassic age that accumulated in a tropical rift valley. Streams flowing from highlands along the valley deposited braided channel sand interbedded with overbank mud. At most outcrops in Connecticut, some of the beds of red mudstone and sandstone contain paleosol caliche with densely packed root casts and rhizoconcretions. These calcified mudstones and sandstones commonly show the initial stages of calcification where subspherical to vertically elongate calcite nodules with crystic plasmic (microspar) fabric replace up to 50% of the host rock. In more mature paleosols, coalescing calcite nodules replace 50–95% of the rock, accompanied by paleosol mosaics of pedotubules, peds, and laminated crystallaria. The best developed caliche profiles are capped by thin (0–10 cm) layers of nearly pure limestone with complex fabrics of nodules, microspar, veins, caliche clasts, laminae, and calcite cement. The caliche profiles accumulated when rates of sedimentation were low. Much of the time the tropical paleoclimate was semiarid, perhaps with 100–500 mm of seasonal rain and a long dry season.     

New perspectives on socioeconomic inequalities in health

In all countries with available data, risks of disease and premature death tend to be systematically higher for those with lower levels of education and income. During the 1990s, substantial progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms and factors involved in generating these variations in health. What has emerged from recent research efforts is a rather complex picture of how individuals in the lower socioeconomic strata are exposed over their lifetime to a wide variety of unfavorable and interacting material, cultural, and psychological conditions, and how these exposures lead to ill-health-either directly, or indirectly through unhealthy behaviors or psychosocial stress. This research has opened a number of new perspectives which we review here: life-course perspectives (dealing with the clustering of advantage and disadvantage over an individual's lifetime), biological perspectives (dealing with the biological mechanisms that bring socioeconomic disadvantage under the skin), macrosocial perspectives (dealing with the effect of the wider social, economic, and political environment), and policy perspectives (dealing with the implications of research findings for the development of effective strategies to reduce inequalities in health).